A panel of recent hires and search committee members speak frankly about the academic hiring process from both sides of the interview table. Focusing on questions of identity, panelists address bias and problematize definitions of fit. Panelists describe choices made in crafting professional narratives and reconceive genres like cover letters as documents that not only persuade search committees, but also subvert the genre in ways that address the candidate's own needs.

Moderator:

Ching-In Chen is the author of a novel in poems, The Heart's Traffic, and coeditor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. A Kundiman, Lambda, VONA and Macondo Fellow, they are the editor in chief of Cream City Review.

Patricia Killelea is a Xicana poet and scholar of Native American literatures. An assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University, she earned her PhD in Native American studies and her MA in creative writing at UC Davis. She is author of the books Counterglow and Other Suns.

Janelle Adsit is the author of the poetry collection Unremitting Entrance. Her poetry has appeared in Confrontation, Requited, The Cultural Society, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Humboldt State University in California.

Sarah Jane Sloane is a professor who wrote The I Ching for Writers; Digital Fictions; and Bodies Like Us: The Story of a Guatemalan Guerrilla. She has written about Wilhelm Reich, dogs, Buddhism, GLBT life, and UFOs in Sun Dog, Tricycle, and Parabola, and held residencies at Hedgebrook and ART342.

Chris Santiago is a poet and fiction writer, and he was recently appointed assistant professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. His stories, poems, and nonfiction have appeared in FIELD, Pleiades, the Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere.